Post written by

Jevon MacDonald

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Decisions about cloud computing services are now too important to be left to individual teams. As the CEO of a company that allows businesses to find, buy and manage cloud services, I have seen that the cloud decisions your team makes today can have a dramatic impact on your business tomorrow. With multicloud usage on the rise and multiple options to choose from, the risks — both positive and negative — are greater than ever.

There are many good reasons for making an organized, strategic move toward multicloud. They include the creation of business opportunities, cost savings, increased enterprise resilience and enhanced collaboration with business partners and supply chains. Below are five ways your team can get the most out of a multicloud strategy.

1. Define what multicloud means for you.

Obviously, it means more than one cloud, but in what sense? With your business objectives in mind, your choices for multicloud will be the following:

• Hybrid cloud. Your enterprise already may have its own IT installation; however might you want on-demand power and capacity. In this situation, you can invest in a hybrid by connecting your own private cloud with an external public cloud provider.

• Multiprovider. In this instance, different departments or users might want different cloud solutions, offered by different cloud vendors. You can multiply the number of cloud services and providers.

Each scenario corresponds to a different situation and need. It is also possible to combine these two scenarios.

2. Start small.

So, you’ve found the cloud — or clouds — of your dreams. Resist the temptation to migrate every application and database. Migration will take considerable time and effort and can distract attention from other critical business activities.

Instead, look for a trial case that meets the following two criteria:

• It promises a measurable, relevant business benefit upon implementation.

• Failure of the trial will not impact any critical business activity or process.

Ensuring these criteria are met will derisk the trial case while allowing your enterprise to take full advantage of the potential upside.

Take time as well to think about governance. Consider a trial governance policy alongside your trial cloud case, ensuring compliance is adhered to. Make your trial case realistic enough to measure the impact of your choices, like storing application data on-site and running the application in the public cloud, or vice versa. If there are timing or latency issues between your private and public cloud, you need to know before a full-scale deployment.

3. Bet wisely.

Be clear about how a specific provider will be chosen and how this decision might impact your business agility and growth. You could also consider the following factors:

• Business goals. Refer to your business goals regularly. Too often, people fall in love with the technology and forget why they are executing the project in the first place.

• Compliance. Ensure a cloud solution does not lead your business out of compliance by storing or processing sensitive data outside a national boundary, for example.

• Interoperability. If your business or end-users need to make two or more cloud solutions work together (for example, collect and store social media data in one place, analyze it in another), ensure this can happen smoothly and reliably.

• Budget. Costs for corner cases that happen to be important to you may be significantly higher than run-of-the-mill usage.

• Vendor lock-in. This may be contractual, practical or simply because your enterprise depends on a service that no other cloud vendor offers. If you choose to create a dependency of your business on one cloud provider, at least know why up front.

4. Talk to your developers.

Developers might look beyond whether a cloud service gets a job done and is reasonably priced and consider the following in addition:

• Whether the technology is “old hat” or innovative.

• If they will be required to relearn an entire technology stack.

• What tools (including automation) are available to configure, provision and deploy a development environment, as well as the possibilities of integrating cloud service management into an existing framework.

Developers may be drawn to new technology — especially if they think it is “fun” or good for their careers — yet established technology may be more stable and offer more possibilities to hire additional developers if the cloud usage proves popular. While ensuring business goals are met, you may need to find a happy medium between cloud provider choices and developer happiness. One method to achieve this might be to have a set of requirements for adopting a new service, so everyone in the organization is aligned.

5. Be the storefront.

Manage cloud sprawl in a world of cross-cloud adoption with a storefront that provides the options your users need before they go looking for them elsewhere. Much like Apple’s curation of the App Store, Salesforce’s AppExchange and others, a developer-friendly enterprise storefront could be critical to managing adoption, compliance and security. As your developers choose Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud or best-of-breed independent services, what’s clear is that if you can’t provide it for them, they can get it themselves.

If perfection is out of stock, excellence is still available.

Above all, multicloud solutions must be driven by business needs. By clearly understanding business goals, multicloud choices can become easier and better. Starting small keeps cloud deployment manageable and low-risk. A suitable checklist of criteria can ensure prospective cloud providers are aligned with your enterprise needs. Lastly, involving all stakeholders (including your developers) can help gain your business an advantage from the cloud services selected.

With suitable multicloud solutions in place, you could look forward to the silver linings that add value to your business and its operations.

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